Film review: The Interview

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Many people don’t know this, but when Kim Jong-un, the leader of North Korea, was a young man, he attended a high school in Switzerland, where, among other things, he developed a taste for Western fast foods and a certain degree of proficiency playing point guard for the school basketball team. As with the other kids on the team, he also developed a love of the NBA and its stars. And like just about everyone, Kim was in awe of Michael Jordan’s on-court skill set.

When Kim took over the reins of power in North Korea upon the death of his father, there was hope in the West that the young man’s exposure to freedom and capitalist consumption would lead to more hunger for both and a rapprochement with Washington. Surely that was the expectation when Google’s Eric Schmidt and Joel Cohen, along with globalization executive Bill Richardson – all of whom have strong ties to the U.S. State department – visited North Korea in January 2013, just before Schmidt’s and Cohen’s futuristic tome, The New Digital Age, hit the bookshelves. One can readily imagine the trio pushing the inevitability of open markets and trying to “honey trap” Kim by suggesting that if he were to adopt the Google surveillance system, Kim could appear to “open up” while continuing to exert total control through algorithms and all-pervasive surveillance. “Works for us,” he might have chirped.

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